Book Image

Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

By : Peter Ritchie
Book Image

Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

By: Peter Ritchie

Overview of this book

When you are developing on the Microsoft platform, Visual Studio 2010 offers you a range of powerful tools and makes the whole process easier and faster. After learning it, if you are think that you can sit back and relax, you cannot be further away from truth. To beat the crowd, you need to be better than others, learn tips and tricks that other don't know yet. This book is a compilation of the best practices of programming with Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2010 best practices will take you through the practices that you need to master programming with .NET Framework. The book goes on to detail several practices involving many aspects of software development with Visual Studio. These practices include debugging and exception handling and design. It details building and maintaining a recommended practices library and the criteria by which to document recommended practices The book begins with practices on source code control (SCC). It includes different types of SCC and discusses how to choose them based on different scenarios. Advanced syntax in C# is then covered with practices covering generics, iterator methods, lambdas, and closures. The next set of practices focus on deployment as well as creating MSI deployments with Windows Installer XML (WiX)óincluding Windows applications and services. The book then takes you through practices for developing with WCF and Web Service. The software development lifecycle is completed with practices on testing like project structure, naming, and the different types of automated tests. Topics like test coverage, continuous testing and deployment, and mocking are included. Although this book uses Visual Studio as example, you can use these practices with any IDE.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Threads


There are two important types of threads in .NET: thread pool threads and non-thread pool threads. Thread pool threads are generally threads that are implicitly created or revived (or otherwise implicitly "re-used"). Non-thread pool threads are created and terminated manually and not re-used.

Creating a thread is an expensive proposition. Each thread has its own stack that defaults to 1 MB of memory. That memory needs to be allocated and committed. It is said that starting a thread can cost upwards of 200,000 cycles, and terminating a thread can cost upwards of 100,000 cycles (for a total cost of 300,000 cycles). Taking on that cost shouldn't be a trivial decision. Thread pool threads are managed by the .NET Framework and the operating system for your use, but their use also has caveats.

So, when should you decide to create your own thread or use the thread pool? Generally, if you need a CPU-intensive operation to be performed that could take upwards of several seconds, creating...